The research is conducted on a number of core topics, including
manipulation, machine learning, navigation, vision, tactile sensing, and reasoning. The goals of this
research are to make robots both autonomous and dexterous, to increase the self-sufficiency of existing
robots, and to enable robots to accomplish very delicate tasks. The Robotics Laboratory is currently
directed by Professor Jean-Claude Latombe

SIMpact is a system currently under development to model and simulate
the interactions between robots and their environments. The ability
to preview the behavior of a robotic system in a "virtual"
environment allows different mechanisms, configurations and
controllers to be tested before being applied to a real physical
system.

UC Berkeley Robotics & Intelligent Machines Lab

The objective
of the Intelligent Machines and Robotics Lab is to give machines the ability to interact intelligently with
the external physical world. To create intelligent machines, we need to understand the combination of
action (control), perception (sensing), and planning.

Computational Vision:
The goal of computational vision is to start with one or more video
sequences of a scene and extract spatial information adequate to guide
manipulation and navigation, as well as to recognize objects in the scene.

FRC Projects: Amongst them you will find: RANGER, a software control system for cross country autonomous vehicles. The system has been used successfully on a converted U.S. Army jeep called the NAVLAB II and on a
specialized Lunar Rover vehicle that may, one day, explore the moon.

The Robotics Notebook at NASA

A Mathematical
Introduction to Robotic Manipulation

Book by R. M. Murray, Z. X. Li, and S. S. Sastry (CRC Press, 1994). The price of the book is $59.95 (slightly
higher if you are outside the US).

Currently, there is an increasing interest in multiple autonomous mobile robot systems due to their applicability
to various tasks such as space missions, operations in hazardous environments, and military operations. Such
systems bring in the problems of both multiple robot coordination and autonomous navigation. Again, multiple
mobile robots may be controlled by using a hierarchical (central) controller. However, tasks mentioned above
obviously require many robots which are able to navigate autonomously. It is difficult to use a central controller or
a hierarchical method, sometimes because of the large distances, sometimes due to robustness and versatility
problems.